Konbini of the Dead is a very short horror manga by Hino Kentarou. If you hadn’t immediately guessed from that title, the type of horror is zombie.
A convenience store clerk spends her days alone in her convenience store, hoping to continue surviving the current zombie apocalypse ravaging the world.
As a person who has watched an absolute pathetic number of zombie movies (the only ones that even come to mind is Night of the Living Dead and Shaun of the Dead), I really liked this manga.
There’s a charm to over the top zombie fiction that’s just gory schlock
~~but also there’s so much zombie shit in general that it’s not hard to be sick of it without even actually experiencing that much of it.~~
but in my ideal zombie series, the zombies are for the majority of the series, outside of the inciting incident and the inevitable breakdown of the shelter, are merely lumbering about in the background.
Better yet if the focus is on the person’s isolation and struggle of keeping sane locked in a small building with the thought that they will very likely die a horrible death if they step outside or just forget to close the door.
There is some weirdness to this manga like
Plus gasoline ran cars are apparently rare and also you can just straight up apparently buy marijuana cigarettes from a convenience store. In Japan. I can always appreciate weird world-building details like that.
but it still basically is your normal zombie series. Shelter in a place for an unknown (to the character at least) amount of time to try and ride out the zombie apocalypse, meet other characters who inevitably start a snowball that makes everything goes to shit, and/or while all of this is going on, add on a plot about a possible cure/vaccine.
Yet, due to how short the manga is (each of the 100 days is like a page or two), that “zombie fatigue” really never gets the chance to fully creep in on you. Plus, a convenience store is a nice change of pace. Shopping malls plus zombies are cliche for a reason. Big area, tons of supplies and shit the survivors can use, and of course when things inevitably go to shit, you can just have a horde of zombies pouring in.
But as nice as the classic zombie horde is, you really only need the one.
This convenience store, being a convenience store, is fucking tiny. I’m not claustrophobic but I’d lose my goddamned mind if I were stuck in such a tiny building for a few days, let alone a hundred. Which is why she starts tempting fate by going onto the roof and out the back door… and of course, eventually she’s going to run out of food...
Meaning she begins to feel the desperate need to make use of her time while waiting for a rescue that may not even be coming. So while the series does start out a bit more light hearted with just her idly passing the days by in a convenience store by herself, it very quickly changes in tone.
But even before then, she was constantly keeping note of her zombified manager’s presence outside…
Probably my favorite bit of the whole manga was when
And of course, the immediate next chapter is them back on the roof and both of them have been bitten. While some would certainly argue that we should have seen what happened, the moment a character makes it clear that they’re going to go back into their shelter which is now overrun by zombies... the conclusion's already clear. At the very minimum, somebody's getting bit.
As a whole, Konbini of the Dead was real fun. It's a quick read, there's at least a little bit of weirdness to make it a bit more interesting than just another run of the mill zombie series, and even though zombies are super overdone, they're overdone for a reason. If it's been a while since you've last watched/read/played a thing with zombies, I'd totally recommend Konbini of the Dead.
For me, it's a 7.5 out of 10 or 75 out of 100.
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